After Kinship
What is the impact on anthropology of recent studies of reproductive technologies, gender, and the social construction of science in the West? What is the significance of public anxiety about the family to anthropology's analytic approach? Janet Carsten presents an original view of the past, present, and future of kinship in anthropology which will be of interest to anthropologists as well as to other social scientists.
- Takes up insights drawn from the study of gender and personhood, substance, the house, and new reproductive technologies
- Problematizes the separation between the 'social' and the 'biological', which has been at the heart of kinship analysis in anthropology
- Written to be accessible to a wide audience of readers
Reviews & endorsements
"In this creative book, Janet Carsten unsettles and reorients our traditional ideas about kinship. Through her deep understanding of kinship theory and comparative eye, we see kinship as it is made in shared experience, and interwoven with concepts of the house, person,gender, nationality, and new technologies. Kinship studies may once again become the heart of anthropology. After Carsten, they will never be the same." Stephen Gudeman, co-author of Conversations in Colombia: The Domestic Economy in Life and Text
Product details
November 2003Hardback
9780521661980
232 pages
229 × 152 × 17 mm
0.51kg
Available
Table of Contents
- 1. Introduction: after kinship?
- 2. Houses of memory and kinship
- 3. Gender, bodies, and kinship
- 4. The person
- 5. Uses and abuses of substance
- 6. Families into nation: the power of metaphor and the transformation of kinship
- 7. Assisted reproduction.
